They're not great for making software. That doesn't mean they're not a decent-to-great tool for a whole bunch of productive or creative activities, often in way

They're not great for making software. That doesn't mean they're not a decent-to-great tool for a whole bunch of productive or creative activities, often in ways that a "real computer" cannot be reasonably used as a substitute—that is, if they vanished tomorrow, in many roles they wouldn't be replaced by a laptop, but by paper, a stack of single-purpose tools, and more human running-about or time-wasting. I think the real/not-real computer thing's not especially illuminating, but I don't take issue with it the same way I do dismissing phones and tablets as "consumption-only", a perspective I find simply baffling, because I see them used for creation and productive purposes all the time in a ton of contexts by ordinary people.